A soldier waterboarded his four-year-old daughter because she was unable to recite her alphabet. Joshua Tabor admitted to police he had used the CIA torture technique because he was so angry. As his daughter ‘squirmed’ to get away, Tabor said he submerged her face three or four times until the water was lapping around her forehead and jawline. Tabor, 27, who had won custody of his daughter only four weeks earlier, admitted choosing the punishment because the girl was terrified of water. Human rights activists demonstrate waterboarding in front of the Justice Department. A soldier father stands accused of waterboarding … Continue reading U.S. Christian soldier ‘waterboarded his own daughter, 4, because she couldn’t recite alphabet’

Three schools from India and Pakistan joined forces to win the regional leg of a prestigious NASA-sponsored aerospace design competition held in India. The teams included one from a girls’ school in Lahore. The winners, with their Indian peers, will travel to the USA later in the year to participate in the finals, alongside teams that have qualified from around the world. There are several messages to be taken from this. One is the tremendous potential of India and Pakistan if they could learn to put aside their differences and work together. The success by schoolchildren in joining hands to … Continue reading Hand in hand

Chris Cork The notion that beating children is somehow good for them has a long history. The origin of the phrase ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ that we use today lies in Hudibras – a satirical poem by Samuel Butler published in 1662. But there are even older though more obscure versions. It was the death of a child at the hands of her teacher that triggered this week’s musings and prompted a trip down the memory lane. April 1995, Chalt, a village to the north of Gilgit and the Naunehal Public School. Standing there on my first … Continue reading Spare the rod

by Mehr Tarar The God of Small Things By Arundhati Roy Penguin Books; Pp 340 The secret of great stories is that they have no secrets. Great stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In a way it is just like you know that one day you will … Continue reading A hauntingly magical story

Jared Diamond One of the disturbing facts of history is that so many civilisations collapse. Few people, however, least of all our politicians, realise that a primary cause of the collapse of those societies has been the destruction of the environmental resources on which they depended. Recent archaeological discoveries have revealed similar courses of collapse in such otherwise dissimilar ancient societies as the Maya in the Yucatán, Great Zimbabwe in Africa, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, etc. These civilisations, and many others, succumbed to various combinations of environmental degradation and climate change, aggression from enemies taking advantage of their resulting weakness, … Continue reading Collapse of civilisations

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